Do they still call it ‘slashdotted’?

There’s a tech-heavy popular nerd website called Slashdot which bills itself as “News for nerds, stuff that matters.” Back in the ancient days of the web — you know, about five years ago — if a website was mentioned on Slashdot, there was a good chance the website would go down because of all the traffic inundating that site coming from Slashdot. Less robust sites are unable to deal with the flood of traffic coming from the hugely popular Slashdot, so the site goes down and is “slashdotted.”

That happened to Cyclelicious momentarily yesterday afternoon when I released the story that Lance Armstrong’s Trek time trial bike was found in Sacramento. About 1,000 people simultaneously sent a link to the story on Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit and elsewhere, sending a flood of traffic to Cyclelicious and bringing my site to a screeching halt. The horrible paradox is that I had record traffic to Cyclelicious yesterday, but nobody could get to the content for about five to 10 minutes.

Ah well, I’ll take the bad with the good. I really appreciate the link love that everybody sent my way! Thank you, all.